Preserving privacy is essential in our personal lives and it is important that our private information stay private. We all have things to hide from random strangers. But in this age of social networks, smartphones and other “smart” gadgets we are essentially living with the Internet at our fingertip and leaking our private data to smart algorithms almost every single moment. Even if you don’t have a Internet connected device, you’re prone to such traps that gives away your data on a daily basis.

From the time we wake up in the morning, to when we go to sleep, and possibly even when we’re sleeping, we are giving up our personal data to some unknown entity or corporation, through our gadgets connected to the Internet or via our everyday actions.

Sharing information has become so much easier that it is essentially a part of our lives now. So much so that we are actually unaware of it most of the times. We install applications on our smart phones agreeing to share nearly all our private data in a second without another thought. We are blinded by the offering of 10% discount at shopping malls in exchange of our personal data.

In this talk, me and my friend Anand B Pillai want to highlight a few instances in our daily lives when we share such data and how often we are vulnerable to our private data being exposed and used in ways which sometimes aren’t obvious. Mostly in order to track us and our habits, with a commercial aim for making profits.

This is _not_ a technical talk. You don’t have to know how computer and the Internet work to attend this. We strictly want to talk about our daily lives and how they are affected by the lack of privacy, and what we can do about it.

It’s time we have some control over our private data.

Session difficulty level: Discussion